Wherein I respectfully disagree with Aaron Wherry's piece in Maclean's on Friday, November 29, 2013:
Party discipline and concentration of power in the PMO are
not new. What is new is that there is a team presently in that office
whose stated intention is to sell us an ideology rather than try to
represent a complex, Canadian voice. In a multi-facetted gem of a country,
all successful past Prime Ministers -including conservative Mulroney, were
motivated to listen more than to instruct. Prime Ministerial power, while extremely concentrated on paper, has always been constrained by both the practice and the pretext of consensual nation-maintenance. Control and discipline were most often used to deal with the cracks in the ever-fragile national consensus. But Mr. Harper has a pre-formed master plan for our country and he isn't big on listening. ***
This government's to-hell-with-the-facts implementation of an ideological agenda may be new but it should not come as a surprise to Canadians. On July 7th, 2011, the freshly minted majority Prime Minister Stephen Harper said this:
"the agenda has to be successfully implemented, and the
country has to buy into it and be happy with the results." http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/0…
So, it's not about the means, it's all about the message.
The RCMP documentation of the Senate expenses cock-up has simply given us a less obstructed peek into the 'Ministry of Truth' sausage factory that has been 'managing the issues' and spinning out the talking points of Mr. Harper's grand vision from day one. Concentrated discipline and control are not the problem. These are very old, albeit freshly honed, power tools. The thing that precipitated the current fiasco is that when the short pants crew attempted to apply those power tools to a bicameral house, they came up against some of the remaining bedrock of Canadian democratic structures. For a few glorious, spark-filled moments, at least, those structures and principles could not be completely controlled by ideological discipline. The substantial, media-savy lump of a formerly faithful minion, composed as he is of the hard stuff of ego, self-interest and raw survival instincts also helped to jar control out of the normally unfailing hands of the master's message makers.
It wasn't the size of the steering wheel that caused this pile up, it was the unswerving direction of a bus on ideological autopilot.
The RCMP documentation of the Senate expenses cock-up has simply given us a less obstructed peek into the 'Ministry of Truth' sausage factory that has been 'managing the issues' and spinning out the talking points of Mr. Harper's grand vision from day one. Concentrated discipline and control are not the problem. These are very old, albeit freshly honed, power tools. The thing that precipitated the current fiasco is that when the short pants crew attempted to apply those power tools to a bicameral house, they came up against some of the remaining bedrock of Canadian democratic structures. For a few glorious, spark-filled moments, at least, those structures and principles could not be completely controlled by ideological discipline. The substantial, media-savy lump of a formerly faithful minion, composed as he is of the hard stuff of ego, self-interest and raw survival instincts also helped to jar control out of the normally unfailing hands of the master's message makers.
It wasn't the size of the steering wheel that caused this pile up, it was the unswerving direction of a bus on ideological autopilot.
***For a glimpse into the incredibly complex balancing act involved
in maintaining consensual control in a long-term government in Canada, I can think of no
better informant than Eddie
Goldenberg: "The Way It Works: Inside Ottawa"
